Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Javier Bardem for Being the Ricardos

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Power of the Dog

Andrew Garfield for Tick, Tick…BOOM!

Will Smith for King Richard

Denzel Washingtong for The Tragedy of Macbeth

I got burned last year predicting against the stats in this category. I thought the sentiment for the recently deceased Chadwick Boseman, coupled with his undeniably great performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, would override the fact that Anthony Hopkins won the BAFTA for The Father. I was wrong, and I will not make that mistake again

It is a little easier this year, considering one actor has won the BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild award, the Critics’ Choice award, and a somewhat meaningless Golden Globe. That actor …

Will Smith for King Richard – Sometimes, a pairing of actor and role just seems designed to win an Oscar. The buzz begins from minute one, long before any footage has even been shot. It does not always lead to an Academy Award win, but when it does, it becomes so inevitable it feels as though it were written in the stars. This is a long way of saying Smith has not been shy about his desire to win an Oscar, and taking on the role of Richard Williams has given him the perfect opportunity to do so.

Of course, none of this works if the performance is bad, so Smith throws himself fully into the role of the famed tennis instructor. He’s got the voice down. He’s got the walk. He’s got the attitude. Smith is showy in all the right ways, evoking the larger-than-life figure while still making the character his own. Smith’s take on Richard is difficult and a little deranged but devoted to his daughters and determined to make them the best they can possibly be. In other words, he’s playing a pretty good dad, which is a core Smith zeroes in on to carry the audience through the story.

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Power of the Dog – What a fascinating and enviable career Cumberbatch has built for himself. Just in the last 10 years, he has appeared in Star Trek: Into Darkness, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and as the voice of the dragon in two The Hobbit movies. But, he has balanced out the blockbusters with prestige work like 12 Years a Slave, The Imitation Game, 1917, and this film. He seems equally at home in either context and never repeats the same performance twice. There is always something new to discover with a Cumberbatch character.

Such is the case with Phil Burbank, a rancher whose self-denial and repression have curdled into anger and vindictiveness. There is no place in the world for him to be his true self, so he lashes out at the world and everyone in it, with Cumberbatch deploying a quiet menace that chills to the bone. Yet, within this villain, there is the soul of a poet, of the person he could have been if the world were more accepting, the side of himself he has suppressed. Cumberbatch nails this half of the character with equal finesse and skill, crafting one of the great movie characters of recent memory.

Andrew Garfield for Tick, Tick…BOOM! – Garfield is one of my favorite actors working today. It has been fascinating to see him navigate the aftermath of starring in a pair of big-budget Spider-Man movies that kept him away from smaller, more interesting work for the better part of five years. He immediately followed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with 99 Homes, Hacksaw Ridge, and Silence, three wildly different films in which Garfield is allowed to explore the full range of his abilities. This year, he returned to Spider-Man, but he has also given us this outstanding achievement.

I intend to wrap up 2021 with a later-than-usual Year in Review next week, once we are past the Oscars, but one bit of information I feel comfortable divulging: I think this is the best performance of the year. As Rent creator Jonathan Larson, Garfield embodies the spirit of every striving artist who is one phone call away from changing his life forever. He sings, he dances, and he brings us into the world of a Broadway wannabe with tons of talent but no luck. The movie does not work if Garfield does not get it right, but he soars and so does the movie.

Denzel Washington for The Tragedy of Macbeth – Would it surprise you to learn Washington is the most nominated leading actor of the past 10 years? It’s true. At an age when many actors start taking character roles or supporting parts or just start working less altogether, Washington has bolstered one of the finest resumés in cinema history with a decade of unmatched excellence. The New York Times recently named him the best performer of the 21st century, and it seems impossible to find fault with that determination.

You have never seen a take on the character of Macbeth like this. Much has been made of Joel Coen’s decision to cast older actors to play Lord and Lady Macbeth, but that has less to do with the success of the film than Washington’s decision to underplay every line where a lesser actor – or even a great actor with a more traditional take on the material – would shout to the back rows. Washington imbues each Shakespearean soliloquy with the weariness and nonchalance of a man at the end of his rope but who believes he always has another card up his sleeve. 

Javier Bardem for Being the Ricardos – I love Bardem. I think he is excellent. He deserves many more leading roles in which he is not cast as a villain but rather a romantic lead or sympathetic hero. He can do just about anything. Just about anything, except play a famously light on his feet Cuban musician and comedian. He does what he can in the part, but his casting here was a mistake.

Though talented and versatile, Bardem carries with him the weight of life and experience. He has seen things. These are great qualities for a performer, but they do not exactly scream out: 36-year-old song-and-dance man. Worse still is that the story does not give Desi Arnaz much to do, which means Bardem is held back by the script, as well as his own casting. But, anyway, good for Bardem earning his fourth acting nomination from the Academy.

The final analysis

For a while, it looked as if the momentum behind The Power of the Dog might carry Benedict Cumberbatch to a victory here, but that momentum has cooled, effectively killing his chances. Likewise, Andrew Garfield had buzz around his work in Tick, Tick…BOOM!, and the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home only bolstered his profile (interesting to note Cumberbatch also appears in that film but did not get a similar boost). However, missing out on a BAFTA nomination with the voters in Garfield’s adopted U.K. home (his family moved to England when Garfield was 3) put a serious dent in his chances.

No, this is Will Smith’s award to lose, and regardless of the twists and turns of the campaign trail, it always has been. A win for Smith would be a feel-good story, a reward from the industry for being one of the most successful and popular actors of the past three decades. Few actors in Hollywood are savvier than Smith, and with King Richard, he saw his moment and seized it. He has played this perfectly – including delivering a stellar performance – and for his troubles, he will walk away with that little gold statue.

Will win: Will Smith for King Richard

Should win: Andrew Garfield for Tick, Tick…BOOM!

Should have been here: Dev Patel for The Green Knight

Next time: Best Actress

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Production Design

The nominees are:

Dune

Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog

The Tragedy of Macbeth

West Side Story

Going back to at least 2000 (and only that far because I am just one person), this is the only time the lineups for the Production Design and Cinematography Oscars have matched five for five. Since the nominations are determined by members of each branch, there is no funny business going on here – such as the Academy choosing five films it thinks looked nice and filling them in for both categories. It is just an odd, historical coincidence.

Or, perhaps, coincidence is the wrong term. Well made films tend to be well made in every aspect, so it should come as no surprise that films where the art of cinematography was allowed to thrive are the very same films where nothing is spared in bringing their worlds to life. We are talking about Production Design today, which can mean the very big, the very small, or everything in between, and the five examples branch members selected this year offer five wholly unique, original ways of exploring the world of crafting worlds.

West Side Story - If you followed any of the reports on Twitter while this movie was shooting, you know Steven Spielberg filmed on location in the streets of New York. And if you have been to New York any time in the past couple decades, you know it looks nothing like the Upper West Side of West Side Story. The task of believably turning back the clock fell to production designer Adam Stockhausen and set decorator Rena DeAngelo, both previous nominees for Spielberg’s Cold War legal thriller Bridge of Spies. Stockhausen is a four-time nominee who previously won for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The neat trick that Stockhausen and DeAngelo pull here is to make real city streets look like a stage without losing any sense of depth or space. West Side Story needs a certain staginess to work, and the fire escapes, storefronts, and construction sites of this film provide a perfect proscenium for the action. The final shot of the movie, even, is a perfect demonstration of Stockhausen’s and DeAngelo’s particular magic. Spielberg allows the camera to drift up and up, revealing the totality of the characters’ world, which is quite small but feels so big.

Dune - Speaking of feeling big, the grandeur of Dune is among its defining qualities. For a film this strange and this dense to work, it must be transportive. The audience must be made to feel part of a world it could never have comprehended before being set down in it. Production designer Patrice Vermette, on his third nomination, and set decorator Zsuzsanna Sipos, a first-time nominee, revel in the opportunity to craft larger-than-life spaces that bring viewers right into the story.

For as much is made of the sandy deserts and open-air scenery of Dune, an equal amount of the movie takes place in the halls of power. All the razzle-dazzle aside, at its core, the story is about statesmen and warlords ironing out mining agreements in opulent palaces. Vermette and Sipos succeed in making each of these palaces and each of the rooms in these palaces feel unique, full of a personality all its own. From Paul’s room on Arrakis to the room where Duke Leto makes his last stand, care, thought, and imagination are on display.

The Tragedy of Macbeth - Joel Coen’s stripped down take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth is all artifice. It is not reality but surreality. The castle at Dunsinane is a house of horrors made spookier by the fact that it is so empty, so unlivable, so foreign. It is what happens when a diseased mind conceives of power but has no concept of what to do with that power. Long halls, giant windows, and steep, narrow staircases abound, evidence of the emptiness of what Macbeth has tried to accomplish.

Production designer Stefan Dechant and set decorator Nancy Haigh build everything from the ground up. Dechant is a first-time nominee, while Haigh is a two-time winner from nine nominations, most recently winning a statue for her transformative work on Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. Here, they craft spaces where nothing is real but rather a simulation of reality. It is a thoroughly literal interpretation of another of the bard’s most famous lines: “All the world’s a stage.”

The Power of the Dog - It’s that house. That dark, angular, oppressive house that sits at the center of a story about repression and hostility and the rot at the heart of the American myth. We have seen the capital “W” West on screen a thousand times before. We know what it looks like. The brilliant trick here, by production designer Grant Major and set decorator Amber Richards, is to give us what we know, then twist it in ways we could never have imagined.

Yes, we get the ranch and the barn and the shops and the old-timey cars, and it is all beautifully rendered. But, then, there is the house called home by the Burbank family and its newest members, Rose and Peter. It should be an oasis, a respite from the unrelenting heat and loneliness of the land. Instead, it is a dreary prison, controlled in more ways than one by a humorless warden. We are never comfortable here, and that is exactly as it should be.

Nightmare Alley - Grand set pieces are right in the Academy’s wheel house – the West Side of Spielberg’s West Side Story or the magnificent estates of Dune – and this year, there is perhaps no grander set piece than the carnival of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. It takes up only the first half of the film but leaves an impression that lingers over our characters for the rest of the story. It is fully immersive, transporting the audience directly into the wonders and dangers of a Depression-era traveling circus.

The production design by first-time nominee Tamara Deverell and set decoration by previous winner Shane Vieau (del Toro’s The Shape of Water) is a marvel in every dirty, dusty detail. But, their artful touch extends beyond these early sequences into the cold elegance and sleek sophistication of Dr. Ritter’s (Cate Blanchett) office, the imposing halls of Ezra Grindle’s (Richard Jenkins) mansion, and the smoky gloom of the hotel. Every locale feels completely lived-in and true to the universe del Toro wants to explore.

The final analysis

The Power of the Dog is the Best Picture frontrunner, and Dune is going to sweep a lot of the crafts awards, but if West Side Story is going to take home anything in the below-the-line categories, it will be this. Voters love work that takes a real location and transforms it into something new (see the aforementioned win in this category for Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood). The work is thoroughly deserving and grand enough in scale that it stands a good chance of being recognized by the Academy.

Will win: West Side Story

Should win: The Tragedy of Macbeth

Should have been here: Spencer

Next time: Best Editing

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Dune

Nightmare Alley

The Power of the Dog

The Tragedy of Macbeth

West Side Story

In researching this piece, I came across the name George J. Folsey. Folsey was the credited director of photography on 167 films across a span of seven decades, stretching from the silent era to the early 1970s. He was nominated for Best Cinematography 13 times from 1933 to 1963 and never won the award. This is a record for futility among cinematographers, at one time tied with modern legend Roger Deakins, who won Oscars on his 14th and 15th nominations.

I mention this only because I had written about Deakins a number of times during his record streak and cannot be certain that I ever seriously considered Folsey. His nominations came for such films as Meet Me in St. Louis and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and he also lensed the all-time sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps the only relevance here is that Bruno Delbonnel, nominated this year for The Tragedy of Macbeth, sits behind Folsey on the list with six nominations and no wins, third-most all time.

To me, it is one of the beautiful things about the Academy Awards that they can make us look at the history of the medium and appreciate work that has come before, work that had perhaps slipped from our collective memory. The masters of the form are all around us, and sometimes, it is good to take a minute to recognize them while they are still around.

The Tragedy of Macbeth - Delbonnel is one among those masters. He does not have the lengthy resumé of some of his peers, but what he lacks in volume he more than makes up for in quality and diversity. It seems as though there is always a new trick in the bag. Take his two most recent collaborations with Joel Coen – the western omnibus The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and this gothic expressionist take on The Tragedy of Macbeth. The two films could not look or feel more different, but both are magnificently rendered and tonally consistent while demonstrating the uniqueness of what makes Delbonnel special.

Larger than life shadows fall in every corner of this film, and Delbonnel uses the soundstages to tighten the noose around the central characters at every opportunity. Even the open landscapes are shot to look narrow and confining, suggesting Macbeth never had a choice, that his path is set. The walls close in further in every sequence of the film until the final scene, which literally takes place on a narrow bridge. There is no escape in the light and no hiding in the dark for these characters, and Delbonnel makes their fate palpable.

West Side Story - Janusz Kaminski feels like a constant at this point. A seven-time nominee and two-time winner, Steven Spielberg’s favorite director of photography has been part of some of the most important movies of the past three decades. His work has influenced the look of modern cinema beyond what is even conceivable, and despite that wide-ranging influence, there is nothing that looks like a movie directed by Spielberg and photographed by Kaminski.

A West Side Story clip recently went viral on Twitter for being such a bravura showcase of filmmaking that people could hardly believe it exists. As others pointed out, the viral clip, while amazing, is hardly the most impressive sequence in the film. That’s just the level Kaminski is working at, moving the camera in ways no one else can, adding flourishes where others would play it safe, and elevating the art of cinema when it would be simple enough just to play the hits. 

Dune - The movement toward rewarding effects-laden films in this category really began in earnest in 1997 with Titanic, which was followed by wins for Saving Private Ryan, The Lord of the Rings, and Master and Commander. Then in 2009, James Cameron returned with Avatar to push the Oscars even further in that direction. Since then, we have gotten Inception, Hugo, Life of Pi, Gravity, and the other Denis Villeneuve epic, Blade Runner 2049.

All of which is to say, Dune is perfectly positioned to join the list of Cinematography winners whose photography is driven, at least in part, by special effects. This is not to discount the spectacular work two-time nominee Greig Fraser does in evoking the distinct worlds of Caladan and Arrakis, but rather to highlight a trend developing in the Academy. It takes a very specific skill set to craft magnificent images around green screens and computer effects, and voters are more ready than ever to recognize that.

Nightmare Alley - We talked a little last time about the two versions of Nightmare Alley currently in theaters: the color version and the black and white one, subtitled Vision in Darkness and Light. DP Dan Laustsen, previously nominated for his Guillermo Del Toro collaboration The Shape of Water, lensed the film in color originally. However, to mimic the look and feel of the classic noirs the film is homaging, it was lit in such a way that converting to black and white was possible. Somehow, it is equally gorgeous in both formats.

Whether in the brilliant pops of red sprinkled throughout an otherwise austere setting or in the subtle grays that take us from darkness into light, Laustsen illuminates the pain and betrayal at the heart of the story. Fascinatingly, for a film that is so much about characters who operate in the shadows, the photography is often bright and crisp, highlighting the way these villains accomplish their evil deeds in broad daylight, right under our noses.

The Power of the Dog - Cinematography is one of only two below-the-line awards that has been around since the first Oscars ceremony. That’s 94 years. For 30 of those years, the award was split between color and black-and-white photography, meaning there have been roughly 600 nomination slots in the category’s long history. Only two have gone to women and none before 2017, when Rachel Morrison broke through that particular glass ceiling with her nomination for Mudbound.

This year, Ari Wegner became the second woman to earn recognition in the field. Her dusty, sun-dappled work on The Power of the Dog brings Jane Campion’s western to life in ways that are both visceral and subconscious. It is not just the magnificent New Zealand vistas that stand out, though. The interior of the central family’s home, which is all shadows and angles, looms large over this world as a more menacing and immediate threat than anything the outside world could conjure.

The final analysis

It stands to reason that if The Power of the Dog is going to win Best Picture, it needs to win a few of the below the line categories. This is a place where it can win, and voters can make history by awarding the Oscar to a woman for the first time. That said, it was just last year that Nomadland won only Picture, Director, and Actress, falling short in all of the crafts categories but still triumphing at the top. I predicted Nomadland for Cinematography for the same reason I would predict The Power of the Dog, but major Slumdog Millionaire-style sweeps are fewer and farther between.

The Academy is not averse to spreading the love, in which case, Dune stands to benefit. If The Tragedy of Macbeth were better liked, it might stand a chance here, but that does not seem to be the case within the Academy. Kaminski is unlikely to win again for a film not near the top of the Best Picture race, and the nomination has to be considered the reward for Laustsen. So it comes down to Wegner or Fraser, and sometimes, bigger is better for voters. Go with Dune.

Will win: Dune

Should win: The Tragedy of Macbeth

Should have been here: The Green Knight

Next time: Best Production Design